Author Archive: Suzanne Norman
The Emma 25 honorees are here!
Meet the 25 incredible small charities that just got free Emma service for life
One of our favorite holiday traditions at the Emma shop is our Emma 25 program, in which we award a lifetime of free Emma email marketing service to 25 small nonprofits who’ve applied for it.
This year, we were once again astounded by the quantity and quality of nonprofits that applied, each one as deserving as the next.
The missions of this year’s honorees vary — helping kids with disabilities ride bikes, fighting human trafficking around the world, supporting design that elevates social issues — but each one spoke to us in a unique way.
We’ve posted the full list of honorees here. Help us honor these organizations by getting to know them, and keep them in mind as you consider your year-end giving, too.
Oh, and thanks for being a part of the Emma Community. After all, it’s your support that powers our giving, and we couldn’t do it without you. Cheers!
It’s Emma’s Featurepalooza!
Take a peek at the new features coming soon to your Emma account
If you’ve been reading here and over on Emma Tech, you know we’ve been hard at work to make Emma simpler, speedier and better for our customers. We’ve shared info about our new platform and changes to come, and today, we’re delighted to give you a closer look at the features and enhancements you’ll find in your account over the next few months.
We’ve got all the details — including sneak peek videos — on our Official Featurepalooza Page, so check it out and let us know if you’d like to be the first in line to try the features.
It’s Emma 25 time, folks
We're giving away 25 Emma accounts to small, local nonprofits. Encourage your favorite cause to apply today!
Fall is in the air, and that means it’s finally socially acceptable to eat candy corn and dress like Snooki, which is not really something you can pull off in, say, April unless you’re actually Snooki.
More importantly, fall marks the launch of our annual Emma 25 initiative. For seven years and counting, we’ve been awarding a lifetime of free Emma service to small, deserving nonprofits and hoping that our email marketing tools help these causes do even more good work in their communities.
Here’s how it works. Nonprofits can apply at myemma.com/emma25 from today through Monday, November 21. We welcome any 501c3 nonprofit with 10 or fewer employees, including current Emma customers. Emma staffers pore over the applications to select 25 (it’s unbelievably tough), and we announce the honorees in early December.
Of course, we rely on you to spread the word. Encourage the nonprofits in your community to apply, whether it’s a group you support, volunteer with or that’s made a difference in your life. And share the news and application page with your social networks, too, if you’re so inclined.
And thanks for teaming up with us to do some good!
A conversation with Emma’s CEO and co-founder
Clint Smith talks about leadership, Emma and, um, pecans with the Nashville Business Journal
Last month’s edition of the Nashville Business Journal featured an executive profile of our very own CEO, Clint Smith.
The Q&A covers a host of topics, including the leaders that inspire him, how he’s overcome challenges and the exciting stuff Emma has in the works for the next few months.
Unfortunately, it’s also publicized the incriminating information that our chief executive has no idea how to pronounce the word “pecan.”
What is the simplest thing you never learned to do?
The ability to accurately pronounce the word “pecan.”
Dubbed by pundits as “Pecangate,” the scandal has rocked us to the very center of our snack closet and calls into question Clint’s familiarity with the entire mixed nut landscape. Can he tell a pistachio from a Brazil nut? Does he even know that peanuts are technically a legume?!
All the pecan drama, as well as the other non-nut-related topics, is available here for your reading pleasure.
Adventures in email marketing
Four ideas for expanding your email horizons this summer
If the arrival of summer has you hankering to explore and be daring, why not start with your own email marketing efforts? We’ve pulled together a few of our favorite ideas into something of a field guide to email adventure. Some are side routes to explore, others are full-on, pack-a-lot-of-granola expeditions. Either way, you’ll find all kinds of ways to expand your email horizons.
Oh, and for the record: This article is best enjoyed staring off purposefully into the distance as gentle mountain breezes rustle your hair. If gentle mountain breezes are unavailable, have Bruce over in accounts payable wave a stack of invoices in your face.
Launch a welcome note.
Someone says hi to you. How lovely. Now wait three weeks and say hi back.
Wait, that’s no good.
But you’re committing the email equivalent of that faux pas if you’re not greeting new subscribers with a welcome message. It’s a great way to build on someone’s initial interest, right when they’re interested. An Experian study shows welcome autoresponders boast a 14% click-through rate compared to the 4% industry average. Best of all, it happens automatically with Emma’s trigger email feature.
If you’ve never set up a triggered welcome email, why not make it your summer goal to launch one? Craft new content with new subscribers in mind, or just add a special greeting to the top of your latest newsletter.
+ Get inspired with profiles of three customers’ successful welcome emails.
+ Setting up welcome triggers is as easy as sending a campaign. Watch how.
Explore surveys.
There’s a wide world of customer insight out there, and you’ve got an easy way to uncover it with Emma’s survey feature. Surveys are free in your Emma account, which is nice, and their results show you priceless feedback to improve pretty much anything, including events, products, customer satisfaction and your latest email newsletter.
Of course, the real adventure begins when you learn what your customers think. Or when you decide to steal the Declaration of Independence. (Use of Nicolas Cage voice is optional there.)
+ Need more convincing? Here are more ways surveys will change your business.
+ For inspiration, see twelve ideas for surveys you can send this week.
+ Not sure how to create a survey? Consider this PDF your downloadable sherpa.
Discover your inactive members.
Legendary outdoorsman Teddy Roosevelt spoke of three uncharted frontiers: our galaxy, the ocean depths and your email database.
Which is our historically dubious way of suggesting it’s time to discover who’s not looking at your emails. Inactive subscribers are an important segment with all kinds of opportunity. Craft a special offer for them, and they’ll remember why they first signed up for your list. Send your next campaign with a daring subject line, and get their attention again. Or dare to remove them altogether, and you may save money.
+ Get more ideas for delving into the details of audience management.
+ Find your inactive members with a quick search — watch our how-to video.
Dare to redesign your newsletter.
Your industry, your goals and your customers’ needs have evolved over the last few years. Has your email newsletter kept up? If not, it may be time to embark on a redesign.
A redesigned newsletter engages readers who may have become accustomed to the same look week after week. But more importantly, the process of thinking through your new design helps you consider what your readers want and improves the overall strategy of your content. In other words, your email won’t just look better; it’ll also be better.
Keep it simple by changing your font selections or image styles. Choose a new layout or work with one of our designers for a fresh template. Or reinvent it from the ground up. Just don’t go all Gaga on us and insist your email be paraded around in a egg pod. It’s an open rate, people, not a hatch rate.
+ Check out the before-and-after from one customer’s stellar redesign.
+ See how these customers turned Emma layouts into stylish campaigns.
+ Request custom email design from our fantastic team of graphic designers.
+++++
Are you plotting any email adventures of your own this summer? What’s the boldest thing you’ve done in an email campaign?
Emma’s a ‘winning workplace’
We're honored to be among Inc's 2011 top small company workplaces.
We’re not ones to toot our own horns, really, but we feel like it’s, uh, toot-worthy to announce that Emma just made Inc. magazine’s list of the 50 best small company workplaces.
Get to know our fellow finalists and find inspiration aplenty to shape your own company’s workplace.
While you’re there, you can “like” our Inc. profile on Facebook, if you’re feeling particularly likey, and help Emma move to the top of the list.
+++
Care to join our (award-winning! yay!) workplace? We’re hiring all kinds of folks, so take a look at our openings and do some horn tooting of your own.
Mark your calendars for Something on a Stick Day
Or, how to create better emails for mobile devices.
Poster design by Matthew Labutte.
Where I’m from (the Ozarks), food just ain’t food unless you can stick it on a stick. A remarkable amount of human ingenuity has been applied to the challenge of taking food that typically requires these pesky things called utensils and transforming it, via stick, into something portable.
Meatballs? On a stick.
Fried pickle? On a stick.
Hot bologna? Not nearly as bad as it sounds, and also, on a stick.
So why not make plans now to honor this completely non-made-up holiday called Something on a Stick Day, coming up on March 28? It’s a chance to celebrate food’s portability. So sure, it’s a fine excuse to have six fudge pops for dinner. It’s a good occasion to make sure your emails are portable, too, and to take a look at email marketing on mobile devices.
Email on the go is popular, folks. Checking email is the number one thing people do on their mobile phones, according to the comScore Mobile Year in Review for 2010. Research from Knotice tells us that for every 100 people who open your email, 13 of them will see it on their smartphone. And of those 13, five of them will be eating a delicious chicken satay. It’s true.
With that in mind, here’s some advice for creating a better email experience for your mobile readers, no matter how much or how little you know about it.
Level Corn Dog: basic mobile advice anyone can use
+ Mobile readers are busy readers, so keep your emails focused. Consider sending shorter, more frequent email campaigns with a single story or call to action.
+ Obsess over your subject line. Mobile users may check your email on the go but also save it for more thorough perusing on their laptop a little later. A thoughtfully written subject line will do wonders to grab their attention. (Molly’s holiday subject line tips are good year-round.)
Level Pork Medley Kabob: slightly meatier tips for the mobile-minded
+ Pretty up your plaintext. While more and more smartphones display HTML, some mobile devices show the back-up version of your email that’s in plaintext. Use special characters, capital letters and tasteful line spacing to highlight your headlines and set off your links.
+ Ask a smartphone user in your office to join your email’s test group. Just seeing how your last campaign looks on an iPhone will make you more mindful of mobile when you plan your next one.
Level Deep-Fried Twinkie on a Stick with Chocolate Glaze: more involved ideas for decadently mobile-friendly emails
+ Smartphones typically show the first few lines of an email that readers scan before opening (or, alas, deleting). Create a line at the top of each campaign that succinctly conveys the point of your message — what the special offer is, what’s in this issue, when the party’s happening, what food-on-a-stick will be served at said party, etc.
+ Consider creating two versions of your email — standard and mobile. Ask your subscribers which version they’d prefer to receive, then segment and send accordingly.
+ If you’re serious about mobile email rendering, invest in a service like Litmus or Email on Acid to preview your email on a variety of smartphones (and other email clients, too).
:::
What about you? What emails grab your attention on the go? Have any of these ideas worked or not worked for your email marketing? Do you have any special plans for celebrating Something on a Stick day? Can I come?
(Oh, and for more skewered food entertainment, see what portable food the always-fun folks at Neatorama found last year.)
—
Photo credit and poster design: Matthew Labutte
Things we love: Hand-drawn illustrations in email
The Boys & Girls Clubs draw some attention with the hand-drawn email look.
Do you ever *not* open that hand-addressed envelope first?
Hand-drawn stuff is warm and personal. And in the mass-blasting, digitized and technical world of email marketing, it’s especially compelling. After all, if we’re all drawn (shameless pun) to the hand-written envelope among our stack of mail, an email with some hand-drawn design might also be more likely stand out in a crowded inbox. I’ve been looking for an excuse to highlight the lovely illustrated design in this email featured here from Boys & Girls Clubs earlier this fall.
More hand-drawn appeal from Sweet Leaf Tea.
How could you add some hand-drawn love to your next campaign?
+ Try replacing your standard icons or photos with illustrations.
+ Add a little hand-crafted texture to your plain email background.
+ Or come up with something entirely different. Find the chronic doodler in your office and report back with your own hand-drawn email masterpieces.
We even incorporated a variation of this handmade approach with our own December email campaign, which you can see here.
Want more handmade email inspiration? Take a look at these Emma customers:
The Button Company, United Kingdom
Pigeon Toe Ceramics, Portland
Emma {hearts} New York
Laura Key leads Emma's New York office.
We recently opened another Emma office in none other than New York City.
Our newest satellite office in the Big Apple joins the illustrious ranks of Emma’s outposts in cities that, as of yet, lack fruit-related nicknames: Portland, Denver and Austin (although dubbing Austin The Funky Mango could catch on).
Anyhoo, longtime Emma staffer Laura Key will be leading our efforts in New York. In our main office in Nashville, she worked with creative firms and agencies interested in licensing Emma’s email marketing services to their clients through our agency platform.
And now, in New York, she’s continuing to get to know the NYC agency community and branching out to share Emma with folks at all kinds of organizations.
Click to view a gallery featuring a few of our New York clients.
Laura’s particularly excited to show off Emma’s commitment to design.
“New York is the center of the design world in so many ways,” Laura says, “and design is one of the things Emma does best, so I’m hoping to bring the Emma experience to all New Yorkers.”
And speaking of New York, great design and email, it’s only fitting that we show you, well, some New York customers with great design in their emails. We’re pretty inspired by their work, and we hope you are too.
Just click on the MoMA email campaign to the right to see a slide show of how the famous museum — and a few other fine organizations, such as the Yankees, RachaelRay.com, NYU, the Brooklyn Public Library and Gramercy Tavern — are using Emma to spread the word about who they are and what they do.
Oh, and if you’re in New York, feel free to email Laura to find out more about Emma’s approach to email marketing. Our office is located between TriBeCa, Chinatown and SoHo, giving Laura all kinds of long lunch options (hint, hint).
5 ways to get your email marketing ready for the holidays
Even Santa needs a plan.
Looking for a strong showing in your email results this holiday season? Craft a plan now with our tips, featuring special appearances by North Pole guests.
If you haven’t started your holiday plan yet, you still have time. And there’s a tremendous opportunity during the year-end months for you to make the most of email marketing. You numbery types might like to know, for example, that email-driven sales were up 11% from 2008 during the 2009 holiday season.
Of course, your holiday email goals may not be sales-focused. Perhaps you’re out to drive donations, promote an event, or just share a festive little greeting with your customers. A little holiday campaign planning really does go a long way. (Insert “making a list, checking it twice” joke here.) So, ask the big questions first. What do you want your holiday emails to accomplish? What are the main messages or offers your customers will connect with over the next few months? And how can email help drive the holiday initiatives you’re planning offline?
Effective use of elfin charts.
1. Look for trends in recent response data.
As you’re crafting your holiday sending strategy, spend some quality time digging into data that’ll tell you what’s been most and least effective over the last few months. For example, if you notice that click-through rates are higher in your more graphic-rich emails, design your holiday campaigns accordingly.
How to: In your Emma account, your Response page displays interactive charts of your mailing results that help you spot big trends at a glance before you drill down to see who’s opening, clicking and more. If you’d like some help interpreting those charts, see some real-life scenarios and advice elsewhere on the blog.
Set the right pace with your emails.
2. Consider your sending frequency and volume.
In 2009, we saw the Emma community’s overall sending volume increase 29% in the holiday-packed final quarter of the year. But think about your email frequency carefully — every fatigued subscriber who opts out in December is someone who won’t see your emails at all next year. Send an email now that gives your subscribers the option to manage how frequently they hear from you, or start slowly ramping up your frequency now (and keep a close eye on ye olde opt-out rate).
How to: Your readers can update their own subscriptions by using the “manage your preferences” link at the bottom of your Emma stationery. You can find more details on customizing that subscription form in our Help Guide. Emma’s survey feature provides another way to learn more about your subscribers, and we’ve got some helpful tips for creating effective surveys.
Reindeer can be sooo chatty.
3. Keep your emails social.
People stay busy during the holidays, but not too busy to keep up with their social networking. In fact, according to Experian, traffic from social network sites to retail sites during the holidays was up 37% last year. So make sure your subscribers have an easy way to share your emails with their friends and followers, and add easy-to-spot links to your organization’s social networking sites, too.
How to: With Emma’s simple built-in social sharing feature, recipients can share your emails with their friends and followers, and you can track your email’s online reach. Read our 5 reasons to embrace social sharing, and then check out the video overview in our our Help Guide for more details about how it all works.
Find the right enticement.
4. Give folks a reason to join your list.
Are you planning on sending exclusive offers and content to your email subscribers during the holidays? Update the language on your website’s email sign-up form accordingly.
That way, your casual site visitors will spot that juicy incentive and become more loyal email subscribers. Just to be clear, you may not want to involve actual juice with your incentive.
How to: You can customize your Emma-powered signup form and publish it to your website, blog or Twitter feed. Our Help Guide provides handy instructions for customizing your form and posting it anywhere you have an online presence.
Make newcomers feel at home.
5. Welcome new subscribers right away.
Here’s one thing you can count on. When someone signs up for your email list, you know they’re interested in hearing from you. Probably right then and there. So build a strong relationship with new subscribers right away with an automatic welcome note. Set a great foundation now, and you’ll have more loyal subscribers through the holiday season. If you’re already sending a welcome note, good for you, and also, take a fresh look to see if it could use a little holiday-specific tweaking.
How to: Welcome emails are a snap with Emma. See real-life examples, or check out the Help Guide for instructions on how to set up any campaign to send automatically whenever someone joins your list. For extra bonus points, consider creating an entire welcome series.
One last thought about your holiday planning: Consider special holiday creative. Since your subscribers get more and more emails in their inboxes during the holiday season, fresh and festive design can focus even the most fruitcake-addled attention spans. Rework your standard template design with a few holiday touches, or put together a memorably designed holiday card or greeting. Need email design help? Emma offers affordable custom holiday designs.
And happy holiday planning from all of us at Emma!
Illustrations by Taylor Schena, Emma designer extraordinaire
Emma is a member of the Email Sender & Provider Coalition and the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group.
Copyright © 2003 - 2012 Emma. All rights reserved.